QCAD writes under ‘QCAD Features’"Features in italic are available in QCAD Professional only.Supported file formats:DWGread support for format version R2.5 through R27 (2013)write support for format version R12 through R27 (2013)DXFread support for format version R2.5 through R27 (2013)write support for format version R12 through R27 (2013)[/i]DXF version R15 (2000) [QCAD Community Edition]"i.e R15 is not in italics.

Can you tell me whether the Drafix version of DFX can be imported by QCAD Community Edition. Thank you. SW

I have just tested two DXFs created with "Drafix Windows CAD 2.1a: October 26, 1992". QCAD Professional (trial) (ie. Teigha) opens them mostly fine (there are accented national characters in texts, those are incorrect, then again, non-ASCII stuff in DXF tends not to be portable anyway, so this is more or less expected).

QCAD Community (ie. dxflib) doesn't open them fine -- things are mostly there, but all texts are stacked on top of each other instead of being in their proper places.

Unfortunately, I am not in the position to share the original .cad or the converted .dxf files (but I can likely create some samples if Andrew wishes to investigate the dxflib issue).

Its "Ultra Drawing (*.DWG)" export format does not appear to be AutoCAD DWG in any way, shape or form.

Hope this helps.

Ed.: The drawings tested are not particularly complex, rather the electric diagram type, but their dxf representation still has layers, blocks and various element types that all seem to be OK.

Attached to this post is a zip file contaning a Drafix CAD drawing in it's native .cad format, as it is exported to DXF, and a bitmap image of how it actually looks like in Drafix.

A small amendment to the above test results: if one opens the attached DXF in QCAD (either Teigha or dxflib), one would observe that both of these have problems with the colours as well. What actually happens is, Drafix apparently exports them so bad that even itself can't restore them when immediately opening the just-exported DXF. (Could be that the DXF of the day didn't support colours. I don't know.)

Long story short: there does not seem to be any viable way of converting Drafix CAD files to anything while both 1) keeping it editable and 2) not losing details. This also possibly includes chains of applications and intermediary formats, and this also is what the AutoCAD forums seem to have arrived to.

Edit: This may not be completely true. AutoSketch claims to write DXF OK and claims to be able to read the Drafix CAD v3/v4 formats, which in turn will probably read its earlier formats. So all one appears to need is AutoSketch (about $300 a pop) and Drafix CAD v3/v4 (which seems to be completely impossible to acquire, legally or otherwise) to give things a try. Actual results not guaranteed...